UNDER DISTRICT [of Columbia] LAW, all residents have the right to use a bathroom consistent with their gender identity or expression, regardless of others’ perceptions. The regulations also specify that all single occupancy restrooms (any restroom intended for use by one person at a time) in any public or commercial space, like a restaurant, should only use gender-neutral signage. For example, signs reading “Men” and “Women” must be replaced with signs that read “Restroom,” or another non-gendered label.

Despite these regulations, many businesses all over D.C. are not in compliance with the law, which is why the D.C. Trans Coalition along with the D.C. Office of Human Rights recently launched the Bathroom Access & Safety Campaign, otherwise known as the “Pee in Peace Campaign” — a community mobilization project designed to ensure bathroom access and safety for all District residents, including trans and gender non-conforming individuals.

The groups are developing a list of all non-compliant businesses throughout D.C.

Hopefully the data collection will make note of how many of the non-compliant businesses are owned/managed by gays and lesbians.

Cambridge, Massachusetts, police officer said Thursday he will “never apologize” about how he handled the arrest of prominent black Harvard University professor Henry Louis Gates Jr.

“That apology will never come from me as Jim Crowley, it won’t come from me as sergeant in the Cambridge Police Department,” Sgt. James Crowley told Boston radio station WEEI. “Whatever anybody else chooses to do in the name of the city of Cambridge or the Cambridge Police Department which are beyond my control, I don’t worry about that. I know what I did was right. I have nothing to apologize for.”

Crowley also said he was exercising caution and is clearly not a racist based on his previous actions.

Those actions, Crowley told the Boston Herald, include giving mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to former Boston Celtics star Reggie Lewis, who suffered a fatal heart attack in 1993 at Brandeis University when Crowley was a campus cop.

Yeh – and the Republican Party isn’t a racist organization because it placed a black guy in its chairman slot.

The U.S. Constitution forbids the bestowing of titles of nobility, but at the end of the day that’s what the title of police officer has become. They have the absolute power of life and death over anyone they come across – and as this incident shows, that includes people lawfully in their own home who prove that they are lawfully in their own home. That cop could have blown Gates away and made up a story about what happened – and if he did, he’d walk. If Gates had even touched the cop, he’d have been charged not with disorderly conduct (or whatever the arcane charge actually was) but with assaulting a member of the nobility a cop and the charge would have stuck at least long enough to cost Gates thousands of dollars in legal expenses – which Gates may well have, but average serfs citizens do not.

Until the class of nobles who have been granted the power of life and death over the serfs citizenry, the Constitution is just as worthless as the Bush junta wanted it to be.

As Evan Wolfson, head of the national Freedom to Marry group and one of the first attorneys to litigate a gay marriage case, puts it, Gill [v. Office of Personnel Management] and Massachusetts [v. U.S.]aren’t looking for a “one-shot, all-or-nothing” ruling about marriage equality nationwide. They seek to nudge the courts in the right direction – getting the courts to first say that states should be allowed to regulate marriage and treat all married couples equally, for instance, or that same-sex couples should be able to receive equal benefits. Such incremental rulings, he said, “would still hand us an enormous victory that would have positive effects nationwide.”

Bear in mind, this is the guy who, well into the anti-same-sex-marriage backlash, said that there was no backlash.

Now, I’m off to worship at the feet of Bill Kristol to get some excellent Middle East prognostication.

At what point does the law – not public opinion, but the law – have to recognize an irrebutable presumption that anyone who campaigns for public office on a ‘family values’ platform is either an adulterer, a pedophile, a crook, some other species of hypocrite or some combination thereof?

According to authorities, one of our own social conservative Republicans has been caught cheating on his wife, and he was doing it with a young legislative intern. At this juncture, we’re going to resist the temptation to make a joke about family values. That’s getting so old it’s not funny anymore.

Suffice it to say that like John Ensign, Mark Sanford and all the rest on the national stage lately, this one is really rich–with a little homemade porn and a bumbling blackmailer tossed into the story to make it even spicier. Ensnared in Tennessee’s own sex scandal tonight is [Tennessee State] Sen. Paul Stanley, the wingnut from Germantown who has crusaded to ban gay adoption of children and who once made the really stupid mistake of saying: “When you’re married, there’s a commitment there.”

According to court documents, here’s what happened: Stanley, who is married with two children, was accused of having an affair with a 22-year-old legislative intern, McKensie Morrison, by the woman’s boyfriend. The boyfriend, Joel Palmer Watts. 28, discovered a computer memory disc with sexually explicit photographs of Morrison that appeared to have been taken in Stanley’s apartment. Watts then blackmailed Stanley, demanding $10,000 in return for keeping quiet.

The blackmailing by the boyfriend is immaterial here – unless, of course, one wants to apply the logic that has been used to exclude non-heterosexuals from the military.

How about an ‘inherently blackmailable’ standard to establish a hardwire exclusion of christianists from government?

At what point does the law – not public opinion, but the law – have to recognize an irrebutable presumption that anyone who campaigns for public office on a ‘family values’ platform is either an adulterer, a pedophile, a crook, some other species of hypocrite or some combination thereof? From C&L:

A Republican [Ohio] state legislator John Adams of Sidney, has submitted a bill that would require a woman to obtain the permission of the man who impregnated her before she could receive abortion services. The language of the bill is beyond insane.

As written, the bill would ban women from seeking an abortion without written consent from the father of the fetus. In cases where the identity of the father is unknown, women would be required to submit a list of possible fathers. The physician would be forced to conduct a paternity test from the provided list and then seek paternal permission to abort. Claiming to not know the father’s identity is not a viable excuse, according to the proposed legislation. Simply put: no father means no abortion

Ever notice that the men who fight so hard for the right to stick their sperm in women’s wombs and keep it there against their will are the ones whose reproduction would least benefit the species?

And, lets be honest. The D and R are irrelevant to this; Teddy survived it the same way that another snot-nosed rich Yankee brat was able to cover up a DWI (and, if J.H. Hatfield was right, a cocaine bust): Undeserved inherited wealth and influence – everything that collectively is the antithesis of what this nation is supposed to stand for and be.

Bringing Chappaquiddick back up may be viewed as bad form – particularly when it is invoked by the left.

But, as I mentioned above, it happened.

As has Teddy’s attitude toward trans-inclusion – which seems to amaze all who don’t see the pattern of the allegedly-liberal Massachusetts being home to perhaps the worst strains of transphobia. I can’t envision that attidude changing in the days of his long black cloud coming down – but I repeat what I said in that previous piece about Chappaquiddick: My friend Dee had a theory – which I will share – but I don’t feel right about sharing it.

[An imaginary] world where 20 million young people make over $75,000 a year and choose not to get health insurance, frittering it all away with their fancy cars and electronic cell phone/camera/potato peelers, I’m sure.

WALLACE: Well, you say that you would like to see the 40-plus million — there are arguments about specifically how many there are, but the 40-plus million uninsured get coverage. Under your idea, how would they get it? How would the government help them get it? And how would you pay for it?

GREGG: Well, first, it’s not a monolithic group. About 20 million of those folks earn more than $75,000. They’re basically young people who opt to spend their money on something other than health care insurance.

The way we would cover those folks is we would require them to buy health care policies for catastrophic events. They would have to self-insure under that.

Say it with me now: WTF????

Why is this so shocking? The overpaid, under(relevant)worked gay rights establishment has created an imagnary world where the greatest threat is something that has never existed: predatory transsexual women in women’s restrooms and showers. And they’ve made sure that the possibility of a trans-inclusive ENDA suffocates in that world.